Sandwiched between twoMad Maxfilms (Fury Road和即将到来的Furiosa), Australian auteur George Miller brings us三千年的渴望, a curiosity, a romantic drama adapted from A.S. Byatt’s short story “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” (Miller co-wrote the script with Augusta Gore).Longingis a story about stories, from the mind of one of cinema’s most visceral filmmakers, yet it is not a film defined by the kind of pulse-pounding action for which Miller is best known.Longingis relaxed, romantic, almost languid. It’s tempting to compareLongingto Miller’s fellow Aussie auteur Baz Luhrmann and his lurid, lavishElvis, butLongingis more constrained, more carefully structured. It reminds me more of the Wachowskis’ similarly frustratingCloud Atlas, a magnum opus that wanders and never quite arrives at a point.
蒂尔达·史温顿饰恒星Alithea,“narratologist” who studies stories, who seeks to understand the role of stories in a world explained by science, which is wonderful but has also sucked the magic and mystery from the world. While at a conference in Istanbul, Alithea finds a pretty glass lamp in the bazaar, and chooses it as her memento of her trip. It has some scorch marks on it, though, and an attempt to clean the lamp results in freeing the djinn trapped inside. Idris Elba stars as the djinn, called simply “Djinn”, who self-describes as an “idiot” and a “fool” who keeps getting trapped in bottles by women who don’t love him as much as he loves them. He’s a himbo djinn, desperate for Alithea to make her three wishes so he can be freed of the curse that keeps him tethered to a bottle.
The problem is that Alithea has read all the stories and myths about djinn and wishes and is no hurry to bring that kind of cautionary tale down upon herself. What results is a sort of reverseOne Thousand and One Nights, wherein the djinn tells stories to Alithea to impress upon her the importance of wishing (there is a direct reference to Scheherazade early in the film). The stories fascinate Alithea, a collector of tales like the djinn, and the film unfolds as a series of vignettes depicting the djinn’s relationships with the women who mark his time outside the bottle.
Longingis gorgeous to look at, with production design by Roger Ford, art direction by Nicholas Dare and Sophie Nash, and cinematography by the legendary John Seale (whodeclared his retirementfollowing this film). Miller, who has an eye for space and scale, makes believable a mythical being who is too big for any room yet can make himself almost as small as he needs to be to blend in. And the earliest story the djinn tells, of his time at Queen Sheba’s court when King Solomon arrives to woo her, is full of wonderful sights and fantastical touches. But as time goes on, magic dies in the world, until the djinn is left in the modern day, where technology makes his existence almost unbearable.
I wishLonging给这个概念有更多的时间。它不需要是电视节目，但即使再过几分钟就能让想法和角色呼吸也不是不对的。所描绘的各种浪漫史大多是无性别的，更糟糕的是冷静。Djinn告诉我们激情，但除了最早的Sheba故事外，我们看不到它。一切都动作的速度太快了，就像Djinn本人一样，这部电影并不是要占据的空间的正确尺寸。是的，Alithea是一个合乎逻辑且故意的无浪漫女人，但这是一旦被爱抓住的对比，这就是更加强调对比的理由。但是，尽管数千年和一个不同程度的魔术世界，但整部电影还是以一个频率运行。它使故事变得平淡，使奇怪而美好的过去像现代世界一样平凡。
But it’s not abadfilm. It’s just at times frustrating, as it teases at a grandiosity that never quite arrives. Swinton and Elba are fun to watch in what is mostly a two-hander between them, but the film never feels as odd or grand as it should, given the context. “Aladdinfor adults” is one way of describing it but it also feels like someone recalling only fragments of another, more interesting film. It is in turns frustrating and alluring, aesthetically rich and narratively shallow.三千年的渴望is a passion project for George Miller that is strangely passionless.
Attached - Idris Elba promoting Beast in London.
三千年的渴望is playing exclusively in theaters from August 26, 2022.
